Recent opinion pieces and articles have discussed the ability to avoid disclosing the details of digital political buys, and it’s understandable why that could be seen as a benefit to certain campaigns.
But that approach ignores the fact that the ability to accurately track political competitive in a timely fashion can be a positive factor when deciding what digital partners to work with.
Through our unique political practice, my company has been able to provide expertise to clients on how to navigate increasingly long and tumultuous election cycles. We’ve also been steadfast in our calls for additional transparency when it comes to digital political ads.
Having conflicting sets of federal and state regulations, combined with different platform-specific approaches to self-regulation, has created a confusing and opaque system that’s not equipped for increased spend on digital political ads.
When seeing a political ad during Jeopardy! or their local news, voters don’t make a distinction based on how they’re watching TV (broadcast, streaming, etc.), but the current regulations do. Unfortunately, regulations tied to how someone accesses programming weren’t built for an era where the line between broadcast and streaming would be as blurred as it is today.
While broadcast and cable disclosure rules are straightforward, they’ve not been modernized to keep up with the digital age. The resulting lack of regulations in the digital space blankets an increasingly important facet of political campaigns in a fog of confusion.
And whereas a voter watching that aforementioned political ad on Jeopardy! via broadcast TV could log onto the Federal Communications Commission’s Public File and see how much that spot cost, who paid for it, etc. – a voter who sees the same ad running on the same episode of Jeopardy! via Hulu Live TV won’t be able to find out any additional information about that spot.
In an election cycle where digital political spending could top $4 billion, how does it serve voters to have that amount of advertising be virtually untraceable?
The inconsistencies between linear and digital political ad spending are only getting worse. When the FCC recently announced its intent to require disclosure of the use of AI in political ads – the Commission made it clear that this rule would only apply to ads on broadcast TV, cable, and radio.
With undisclosed political ads playing an increasingly significant role in every election from dogcatcher to president, and the tremendous risks posed by AI manipulation – our political media landscape stands to become more fragmented and less secure in the coming years.
Simply put, existing regulations were not designed for the political campaigns of today. The industry’s ability to create and serve ads has completely outpaced the ability to regulate them, which has exposed significant risks in the way we conduct political advertising.
Allowing digital political ads to skirt the disclosures that voters have come to expect from linear ads is bad for advertisers, agencies and voters. In the absence of a significant effort on the part of the FCC to regulate disclosure of all political ads, it’s unfortunately up to the platforms themselves to make competitive tracking and disclosure a priority.
One of the recent trends in political media has been to engage additional targeting and technology solutions that were originally developed for the commercial advertising industry. While real-time competitive intelligence may not be realistic when it comes to brand clients, it’s been the norm in linear political media for decades. In fact, we believe that the comparatively slow adoption of digital advertising in the political space can be traced – at least in part – to the lack of actionable competitive data.
As such, our first question when evaluating potential digital partners is often “what is your ability to provide similar competitive insights to what we get from the linear side?” The partners who can provide those insights are the ones who will shine in this political cycle, and beyond.
Tyler Goldberg is the Director of Political Strategy at Assembly Global where he also leads the agency’s Advocacy Consulting Technology practice.
